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The need for a practical understanding of homeless women's lives motivates and underpins the life history and experiential approach adopted in this study. Homelessness is seen as a life process and the lives of homeless women, and the stories they tell about their lives, are experienced and specified in terms that are appropriate to social understanding.

Client files of a city emergency service agency were randomly sampled to examine the post-emergency experience of different types of elderly clients. More than half of the emergencies were housing related. Interviews with these clients six months to three years later reveal a high rate of continuing need, institutionalization, and death.

This Background Paper provides a summary of the research evidence, service provider experiences and feedback, current Australian statistics, and current Australian services. The aim of this paper is to provide an introduction to the diverse experiences and needs of older women who are experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness.

The very nature of homelessness means a lack of access to many of the supports most people take for granted. Older people can often be excluded from support services because of fierce independence and a reluctance to push their ‘rights’; they become invisible. People who are homeless do not come to the attention of aged care services and to some extent, remain invisible.

Abstract
In spite of Australia having an aged-care system that provides a wide range of residential and community-based, aged-care services to elderly men and women, which are appropriately monitored and audited, homeless people have historically found it difficult or impossible to access those services.

This Plan for Change proposes a series of initiatives to help older women to be able to live in homes that are safe, secure and affordable. It has been developed by a group of non-government agencies...